Improving Patient Outcomes with Data Access for Everyone

The US healthcare industry is under a lot of pressure. With tightening regulations and intense debates around the future of the Affordable Care Act, players across the ecosystem—payers, providers, pharmaceuticals—are being called to operate more efficiently while also making strides in improving patient outcomes.

The US government has begun to roll out the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, which not only requires organizations track specific metrics it also calls for these organizations to share those metrics with the government (Medicare) and make general patient information available to other medical providers. In an industry where information silos have been the norm, complying with these new regulations means radical changes. In fact, a recent survey found 64% of healthcare providers are unprepared to manage and/or execute the requirements from this regulation.

The Future of Healthcare is Data-Driven

In response to these changes, healthcare organizations are becoming more data-driven. Though many have already been collecting large volumes of data—patient information, physician performance metrics, billing and insurance information, and pharmaceutical data—they are now being asked to analyze that information regularly, and deliver critical insights to all levels of their organizations to actively affect change.

That’s because those who need answers to data questions—executives, office managers, clinicians—don’t know how to use these cumbersome BI tools to get answers. Nor do they have the time or inclination to learn. Instead they have to turn to pre-built reports, or rely on over-burdened data experts to get the the information they need.

Furthermore, the depth at which these users can explore their data is often hindered by stringent security requirements. For good reason healthcare data is held to strict privacy requirements, but so much so that blending data from different sources and managing governance is difficult. And because many organizations rely on traditional BI tools, they often find themselves managing complex data pipelines that result in data silos or lengthy waits to run special analyses across data from those disparate sources.

The Challenges of Governed Data Discovery

One healthcare company has met these challenges and democratized data for their business users with ThoughtSpot’s Relational Search technology. Leading healthcare service provider Availity synthesizes and shares data in real time between health plans and their nationwide provider networks.

Processing over 5 million patient records each day, Availity’s client services team struggled to get the visibility they needed to address customer needs and understand larger marketplace trends fast enough. The massive volume of data they process includes hospital data, patient records, billing information, and insurance records. They analyze this data and provide customers with key insights to help address issues and drive operational efficiencies. Unfortunately, as the incoming data volumes grew, the team found themselves waiting longer and longer to access the data.

The BI tool Availity had in place was at the center of this issue. It required a level of expertise most business users lacked, and their supporting BI team spent hours each week building and maintaining cubes. Availity wanted a solution that would be easy enough for their client services team to perform their own analysis, and access data at both the summary and detail level on the fly—without compromising their stringent governance requirements.

Making BI Accessible for the Everyday User

Availity turned to ThoughtSpot to help streamline their data pipeline, and provide their users with self-service analytics. With ThoughtSpot’s intuitive search interface, anyone can build their own reports in seconds—no more waiting for the BI team to create reports for them.

The BI team has also seen a number of benefits. They no longer have to build or maintain cubes, with ThoughtSpot’s unique architecture data is aggregated on the fly as users search for answers. Furthermore, ThoughtSpot’s built-in governance allows Availity to determine access at the row, user, and object level, satisfying strict privacy requirements.

To learn more about how Availity has created a governed data discovery environment for their users, check out the on-demand recording of recent webinar, Search-Driven Analytics for Healthcare: Improving Patient Outcomes with Data Access for Everyone. Jeff Currier, the Data Management and Analytics lead at Availity, explains how he brought on ThoughtSpot to blend data from different sources and provide teams with access to self-service analytics to they could explore the data as they needed to.

By breaking through information silos and giving their teams direct access to the data they need to see everyday, Availity is delivering superior service to the clinicians and medical facilities they work with. Now the client services team is helping physicians and other medical staff across the US affect change with data-driven decisions every day.